Rodri is a symptom of a sport at breaking point – and we’re all to blame

It had to be Rodri, didn’t it?

The man who, before this season, according to football data website Transfermarkt, had missed just five games through injury for Manchester City since joining the club in 2019, is out — and possibly for the rest of the season.

Why did it have to be Rodri who suffered a serious knee injury during the 2-2 draw against Arsenal on Sunday? Because football rarely fails to deliver cruel twists of irony and it was Rodri who, just last week, said players could be close to striking because they’re playing too much football.

Now, the man who never gets injured is badly injured, just weeks after being moderately injured (with a hamstring problem).

Has Rodri been felled twice in quick succession because he’s been overplayed in recent years, his body churned into mince by an unrelenting, never-ending football schedule that is full to bursting? Well, without access to Manchester City’s personalised load data and whether Rodri was already in the ‘red zone’ heading into the Arsenal game, it is impossible to be sure.

And, yes, players have always got injured and, yes, serious knee injuries aren’t always workload-related. Maybe it was just a case of bad luck, move on, nothing to see here.

What we do know, however, is that more football tends to lead to more injuries and a serious one to a player who many believe could win the Ballon d’Or next month will only amplify people’s concerns.

Within the sport, Rodri’s remarks had already garnered waves of support. “Rodri is right,” Real Madrid goalkeeper Thibault Courtois said in a conversation with Spanish streamer Ibai Llanos. “People say we earn a lot of money, that we can’t complain – and that’s true – but we have to find a balance because the best aren’t always going to be able to play.”

Thibaut Courtois backed Rodri’s calls for footballers to play less (Angel Martinez/Getty Images)

Chelsea head coach Enzo Maresca agreed. “In terms of games, it’s too much,” he said before the weekend game at West Ham. “I don’t think we protect players. For me, it’s completely wrong the amount of games that we have.”

They were not alone. Aston Villa captain John McGinn expressed similar reservations, as did Liverpool goalkeeper Alisson, City manager Pep Guardiola, La Liga president Javier Tebas and Barcelona’s Jules Kounde.

But while coaches and players are largely of one accord, the schedulers beyond the domestic leagues, like FIFA and UEFA, appear to have far less appetite to cut down on matches.

UEFA president Aleksander Ceferin told Gazzetta dello Sport two years ago: “It’s easy to attack FIFA and UEFA, but the thing is simple. If you play less, you get less money. Who should complain are the factory workers who get €1,000 (£843; $1,110) per month.”

Meanwhile, FIFA claims on its website that: “Of primary importance in football’s present and future is the protection of player health and wellbeing.

“The suggestion for an overhaul of the calendar could include mandatory rest and preparation periods with fewer matches, fewer travels and less time away from clubs and families as a result.”

Yet it is FIFA’s expansion of the Club World Cup to 32 teams at the end of July in the U.S. that has poured fuel on the schedule fire, particularly if you’re of a Manchester City or Chelsea persuasion.

City, who play Watford in the Carabao Cup tonight, 49 hours after the Arsenal game finished, could play up to 75 games this season if they reach the final of every competition they’re playing in, while Chelsea could play 74.

Throw in 10 internationals scheduled during the season and someone like Rodri (if he wasn’t injured) or Bernardo Silva has up to 85 matches scheduled between early August and mid-July, which works out at one every four days.

It is undoubtedly too much. Rodri estimated last week that 40-50 matches per season would be ideal, but anything above that leads to an inevitable drop in performance levels due to fatigue.

Rodri is facing a prolonged spell out (Michael Regan/Getty Images)

The immediate counterargument for this subject is often centred on the fact players are earning hundreds of thousands of pounds per week, so they have no right to complain about how much they are flogged.

It’s kind of a moot point given we are the ones who suffer, not just the players, if Rodri, Kevin De Bruyne or [insert players from your favourite team here] are in the treatment room rather than on the pitch. And besides, does money really excuse riding roughshod over player welfare? Is it OK to flog a player earning £200,000 a week, but not one banking £100,000 a week? Where is the cut-off point?

And we’re all complicit, too, right? Clubs are happy to take the money offered to them for extra games in UEFA or FIFA competitions without putting up a protest as to the welfare of their players, or will organise energy-sapping two-week-long pre-season tours to the U.S. or the Far East, which are purely exercises in making money. Or they’ll do post-season tours to Australia after a gruelling season and before a summer of two big international tournaments, a la Newcastle and Tottenham Hotspur.

And we, the media, or fans, we’re all complicit in that we just keep gobbling all the football up in our metaphorical goal mouths. We pay Sky Sports, TNT Sports, Amazon, CBS and whoever else to watch the games, we incessantly scour social media for football content, or play fantasy football, or download club apps.

The whole thing is disgustingly gluttonous. Brian Clough’s famous quote on football being screened on television (“You don’t want roast beef and Yorkshire pudding every night and twice on a Sunday”) became absolute decades ago.

And it’s not going to get any smaller anytime soon. The Champions League has expanded to 36 teams, the Club World Cup is going to 32 teams, the World Cup is growing from 64 matches to 104, women’s football gets bigger every year, there are more than 1,000 EFL games on UK television this season, and there’s even a new competition for non-League and Premier League under-21 teams.

What makes it stop? Player strikes would get decision-makers sat around a table, but it is hard to see anything other than the calendar being condensed so that more sustained breaks can be taken, i.e. at the end of a season or for a bigger mid-season winter break. Competitions, aside from perhaps the domestic top flights, are not going to decrease in size when they are currently getting bigger.

GO DEEPER

After Rodri’s comments, should footballers go on strike over workload? – The Debate

Dwindling audiences are probably the only thing that can slow football down. There are signs that the younger generation are less interested in watching live football and more bothered about highlights, given dwindling attention spans and the prohibitive cost of attending live matches, but we are talking about the kind of drop-off that takes a long time to make a tangible difference to the revenues of TV companies.

A tipping point will be reached at some point. It may take a deluge of injuries, or early retirements, or a drop in the standard of football owing to fatigue. Until then, money trumps everything else — we all feed the football money machine.

We’re all to blame.

(Top photo: Martin Rickett/PA Images via Getty Images)